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Dropdown Selects Email, But Hides Address From Harvesters

Let's suppose you have a contact/feedback form with a dropdown list of people the form user can send messages to. The dropdown could be by department, by staff name, or even by subject matter.

Let's suppose further that individual selections on the dropdown list need to have the message sent to different email addresses.

One way to do that is to put the destination email address as the value of the selection. The name of the dropdown list field would be the name the form processing software expects to contain the email address. Example:

<select name="recipient"> <option value="bill@example.com">Billing Department</option> <option value="george@example.com">Sales</option> <option value="sue@example.com">Abuse Handling</option> </select>

The bad, the really bad thing about that is the email addresses are exposed to spammers' harvesting robots. (This is true even when the address is in a hidden field.)

Master Form V4 can remove the exposure.

All email sent out by Master Form V4 is generated from plain text email templates that allow you to format the email to fit your specific requirements.

Email templates have the additional feature of eliminating the need to expose any email address in the HTML webpage form code. It's done by specifying the email address in the template instead of in the form.

So, instead of email addresses in the dropdown list HTML form code, the file name of individual templates is used.

Here is an example:

<select name="emailtemplate"> <option value="billingmail.txt">Billing Department</option> <option value="salesmail.txt">Sales</option> <option value="abusemail.txt">Abuse Handling</option> </select>

Master Form V4 can send out multiple emails from multiple templates.

As an alternative to a drop-down list box, the user could choose with checkboxes, radio buttons, or a multi-select menu box. If more than one template is checked or selected, Master Form V4 will send an email generated from each template.

The above is just one function Master Form V4 can handle within it's mission of preventing abuse and reducing your vulnerability.

The software is quite versatile, possibly the most versatile form handling software available on the Internet.

Will Bontrager
©2005 Bontrager Connection, LLC

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